


the house of my father and son

by sagemb



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Public Speaking, college tours, the ivy leagues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-15
Updated: 2018-09-15
Packaged: 2019-07-12 20:08:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16002389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sagemb/pseuds/sagemb
Summary: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PUBLIC LECTURESMarch 5 - TONY STARK, Iron Man, CTO at Stark Industries"The New Element"McCosh Hall, Room 50; 6:00 pmTony Stark will discuss the decades-long history of a "new" element derived from an extraterrestrial energy source. In 2010, Stark first synthesized the element to power his Iron Man suit, and subsequently it became the [...]READ MORE





	the house of my father and son

Peter had learned to drive in May Parker's 2001 station wagon, and it showed.

“Now, older Volvos are solid, reliable machines,” Tony told him as they pushed through the streets of Princeton, New Jersey. “They’re like tanks. But this is an Audi. German engineering—Ulrich Hackenberg, he’s a buddy of mine—plus some of my own mechanicking. You gotta know how to handle it. It understeers a bit, you gotta be precise.”

Tony had always liked Princeton immensely. In an ideal world, he might have even gone there instead of MIT, had he not sworn off attending Howard's alma mater in a fit of resentment and teenage rebellion.

But it was never too late to appreciate how perfectly appropriate and suitable Princeton was for him, even as a middle-aged, full-time saver-of-the-world. He liked how beautiful the campus was. He liked the town itself and how it had all the bustling eventfulness of a city yet none of the grimy aggression. He liked the rows and streets of small houses with neat lawns.

He liked how the history and culture could dwarf him. Invariably he felt unmoored and homeless here, there being no tower with his name on it. He could be anyone.

"We're almost there," he said. "Once we hit Nassau Street, you'll get to see all the campus buildings."

The town had made itself known to them first as a couple of houses emerging out of the tangled woods, and then the bleak browns and greys of New Jersey in early March had given way to tightly-packed architecture. Peter had been behind the wheel since they'd first set out, so it was a quiet drive between his white-knuckled concentration and his vested attention to NPR's Morning Edition newscast.

"Hotel's right there on the right, make a turn," Tony said, and Peter did. "You remember how to park? Look, over there, open space. Align your back wheels. Good. Easy."

"I got it," Peter muttered.

"I know you do, kid. If you scratch or dent my car, I'm taking the repair fees out of your salary. Straighten your wheel out _slowly."_

"Wait, really?"

"Of _course_ really. I love unpaid internships, they really warm the cockles of my cold capitalist heart. Okay, you can pull in about another half inch. Awesome. Throw it in park." Tony exhaled. "Nice one, kid. No casualties."

Peter wiped his palms on his jeans, turned off the ignition, and handed the car keys to Tony.

"Thank you, Mr. Parker," Tony said, and opened the door. "Come on, get your stuff. Let's head in."

Their hotel was really an inn built like a Victorian mansion, and on the outside it might have belonged to an old-money professor, but the interior was glistening and modern, slanting streaks of sunlight from the windows illuminating the bar.

Howard would have liked the place, Tony thought absently.

The receptionist recognized him—her eyebrows jumped—but chose to pretend that she hadn’t while she checked them in. It was an Ivy League town; you were taught to do this. Although Tony wouldn’t have minded if she’d been more excitable. Earnestness rarely offended him, and even less so since he’d met Peter.

“Your tour’s at noon, so we’ve got a bit,” Tony said on their walk up to the second floor. “Tell you what. Unpack and we’ll go to brunch.”

Peter nodded and disappeared into his room. A minute later, as Tony was hanging up his suit, he heard Peter’s voice yell through the wall, “Mr. Stark, there’s a Jacuzzi in here!”

“Don’t drown in it!” he yelled back.

* * *

Brunch happened, per Friday's recommendation, at a bustling pancake place on Nassau. It was quaint and hipstery, as college town brunch places were wont to be, and the portions were large. This pleased Tony on Peter's behalf, who ordered a plate of chocolate chip pancakes and an omelette and some hash browns and a link of sausage and some hot chocolate to wash it all down—if Tony had had a normal life experience, he would have been appalled and slightly disgusted. But he seemed to be permanently surrounded by people who were metabolically fucked, so.

“You know, this was where my parents met,” Peter said suddenly—which, _what?_ And Tony's face must have expressed something similar, because then he hurriedly explained, “Okay, not like, _here_ here, not in this pancake place, but like, at Princeton. They both did their doctoral research here.”

“Wow,” Tony said, because this really was interesting. Peter didn't mention his parents much. “What did they get their doctorates in?”

“Biology, I think.”

Tony nodded. “My dad, he went here too. For his bachelor's and his PhD, he was boring like that. I think there's a physics lab named after him here somewhere.”

“Whoa, that's pretty cool,” Peter said. “So does this place remind you of your dad?”

“A little bit,” Tony said decisively, then, because sometimes it took a negative amount of effort to be cruel, “Does it remind you of your parents?”

“Not really. Well—I don't really remember, you know. I mean, I guess it makes me _think_ about them—yeah. It makes me think about them.”

“You've got whipped cream on your cheek,” Tony said.

* * *

For the campus tour, Tony had brought his most nondescript pair of black sunglasses. He put them on now, along with a woolen tartan scarf which covered much of his goatee and a beanie topped with a pom-pom to keep his ears warm, and found that he looked like every other middle-aged suburban dad out there. He was delighted.

He was slightly less delighted when Peter turned out not to have brought a hat or scarf, and immediately bought him both from the nearest clothing store.

“You have absolutely—no sense of self-preservation,” Tony said, winding the scarf around Peter’s neck even as he tried to duck away. “It’s forty degrees, it’s _cold_ , you gotta—stop that, are you trying to make me accidentally choke you to death?”

“No,” Peter grumbled. “Stop.”

“You’ll thank me when your ears haven’t frozen off by the end of this.”

They were walking up to Frist Campus Center now, where there were a bunch of kids and parents standing at the entrance—their tour group, presumably. Peter squeezed himself in and introduced himself to the tour guide, a curly-haired girl, then to a couple of the kids around him. He seemed apologetic about his very presence— _bad for business and social success,_ Tony’s brain screamed, but he found himself smiling at it anyway.

When the tour started, Tony hung near the back of the group. Their guide introduced herself and started giving a minute-history of the university, which he tuned out until he heard her say “—one of our most notable alum, Howard Stark. We never got Stark Junior, but I’ve heard that he’s actually giving a lecture today over in McCosh Hall. Unfortunately there are no tickets to that left, but stick around and you might just spot Iron Man on campus.”

Peter turned his head around to meet Tony’s gaze. Tony raised one finger silently to his lips, smiling conspiratorially.

He had vague childhood memories of this place: Howard visiting associates on the faculty, sitting in parlors of oak and leather with a glass of something-or-other in his hand. And when Tony inevitably got bored of watching Howard schmooze, Jarvis would take him to the Fountain of Freedom and roll up his pant legs so he could wade calf-deep in the pool.

It turned out that Peter wanted a picture next to every building and every sculpture on campus: “Come on, Tony, get on the tiger, I wanna take a selfie with you in the background,” he yelled, and nearly knocked over a tiny Asian girl taking her own selfie with a statue of a sitting bronze tiger. Tony pulled a glute indulging him.

“Your fault,” Tony grumbled, trying not to massage his ass cheek in public. Several other parents had already recognized him earlier and were now casting curious glances at them. The last thing he needed was to have pictures of him inappropriately touching himself end up on the Internet.

Peter grinned. “Not my fault you’re old.”

“Aren’t you tired of that insult by now?”

“Nah.”

“Well, I am. It’s a tired, overdone insult. I’m over it. I’m aging fantastically, Parker. Zero percent of this is Botox. I scored myself a beautiful wife all on my own, and she finds me to be a very attractive, sexy man. Wrinkles are sexy. Just wait a few years, I’ll be a total—total silver fox. You won’t _believe—”_

“Please stop,” said Peter.

“No, you’re right. I’m too vain to let myself go grey. I’ll dye it before that happens. Blond? You think I could go blond? Yes? No? What if I were _ginger_? Oh, god no.”

“Tony, please quiet down, we’re heading into a chapel.”

“It’s widely known that I’m an irreverent heathen with no respect for decorum,” Tony said, then shut up.

* * *

The tour ended behind the Woodrow Wilson School in the courtyard with the Fountain of Freedom. Everyone applauded the student guide and said their goodbyes and the group dissolved, some remaining to mill around the fountain, some leaving to duck out of the cold.

The Fountain of Freedom was a towering brass structure with spires and crevices like a slab of eroding rock. The massive wading pool surrounding it was drained this time of year, but even so, Tony stepped straight into the center of it, pushing through throngs of people coming and going like faceless bodies in a time lapse. He pressed a hand to the cold brass. It numbed his skin down to the bone, and he stood there feeling the crags and bumps in the metal and every single line etched into his face.

Someone’s shoulder bumped his; Tony turned and saw the kid standing next to him, watching his face.

“Hi,” Peter said.

“Hi,” Tony said. Strangely, he wished that the pool were filled and that he and Peter were barefoot. To counter this, he let go of the sculpture and pressed his icy hand to the back of Peter’s neck.

Peter yelped. “What the fuck! What’d you do that for?”

“Revenge for all the selfies you made me take,” explained Tony. “Come on, let’s go.”

* * *

In Palmer Square, Tony got recognized by a group of teenagers.

“We’re going to your lecture tonight,” one of them told him.

“It’s an honor,” he said, smiling, and saw Peter warily duck into a J. Crew store. “You guys want a picture?”

“That’d—that’d be great,” said the girl who had first approached him, and Tony took his nth selfie of the day. After she checked it, she said, “Thanks so much! See you tonight!”

“Looking forward to it,” he replied.

When he went into J. Crew to find Peter, he immediately heard a voice behind him squeak, “Oh my gosh, it’s Tony Stark!”

Tony rolled his eyes. “You’re hilarious.”

Peter held up his phone. “You’re my hero! Can we take a selfie?”

“Kid, you can’t make fun of something you did yourself not an hour ago,” Tony said. “And you better not post those to Instagram until tomorrow unless you want us to get mobbed.”

“I Snapchatted you tying your shoelaces this morning,” Peter told him.

“You keep me humble.”

Around four-thirty they went back to the inn to meet with the university events coordinator who had invited Tony, who told him over dinner that it was an honor to host him, that everyone was very much looking forward to his lecture, and that she hoped he was enjoying Princeton, yadda yadda yadda. He didn’t mind it, not really, it was just boring to smile politely for an hour straight.

“I don’t think she understood why I was there,” Peter said as they drove to the lecture hall.

“Yeah, well, sometimes Tony Stark needs interns to push his work onto. I can’t look invincible all the time.”

“You don’t actually make me do any work,” Peter said. “Other than when I uploaded those powerpoint notes onto your HUD glasses yesterday, and you told me you wouldn’t need those anyway.”

“I said _look_ invincible. It’s all about appearances. Whether I _am_ or not is a different story.”

“Pepper said you were a mess at presentations until she started making your notecards.”

“Pepper gives herself too much credit,” Tony said sourly, cut the ignition, and headed into the building.

* * *

Soon the lecture hall filled with people.

“I, uh, I’ve never told anyone this story,” Tony said to hundreds of listeners. “So, well, here goes. In 2010, I was dying.”

Shocked white noise.

“Heavy metal poisoning. The unit that powers my suit, it’s called an arc reactor. It was embedded in my chest at the time, fused to my sternum, and the palladium core was being continuously fried by the neutron bombardment.”

The room felt cavernous, coughs and shuffles echoing; Tony hated this, the unfiltered quiet. So he took a breath and told the public for the very first time of how he had been forty years old and living his last birthday, and then of Ivan Vanko's father, who had befriended a thief and butcher, and of how together Anton Vanko and the butcher-thief had looked at a glowing blue cube and theorized something that did not yet exist.

"But we're Starks, we're futurists," he said. He could see Peter sitting in the audience and suddenly imagined Howard there too, and Maria and Jarvis and Anton Vanko, his very own namesake, his ancestor.

"He left me his notes. He'd put together a couple sketches, a Bohr model, a full notebook of readings on the Tesseract and other materials—" Behind him, the slide on the projector changed: pictures of pages from the notebook, the Expo atom model. Awful, bloody history. Howard’s lifetime had been lived from one war to the next, and he had been very good at war. "He told me to finish the work he couldn't. And I was dying, and I obviously, you know, had to stop doing that because it was bad for my health, so I locked myself in my basement for a week or so, built myself a nice little prismatic particle accelerator, and synthesized a new element." He shook his head. "And it worked. Completely clean fission-fusion cycle. Dead for twenty years, and my father still somehow saved my life.

“Oh, you wanna hear more about the particle accelerator and the new element? Give me a moment here, I'm unloading my sob story. The impossible feats of engineering can wait," and people laughed, and the tension in the room was gone, and so were all the ghosts. Peter was smiling in the front row.

* * *

The night was pitch black by the time Tony and Peter left the building. He was tired; he’d had his fill of hearing his own voice. Still, he said to Peter, “You did good work on the slide notes. Made things easier for me today.”

Peter shrugged. “It was no big deal.”

“Doesn’t matter. You did the work.”

“It was a good lecture,” Peter said. “You explained everything, like, super well. It was almost like you were telling a story.”

“Good to hear.”

Peter yawned. “Thanks for bringing me here.”

“No big deal,” replied Tony. “You wanna get ice cream before bed?”

“Oh yes please,” said Peter.

The ice cream place they went to turned out to be ridiculously overpriced, but Tony could afford it, obviously. And Peter liked his sundae, which was the part that really mattered.

“I’m going to use my Jacuzzi,” Peter informed Tony, when they got back to the inn.

“Don’t drown,” Tony said again, and Peter gave him the look he frequently did, the one that said that Tony was not funny. Perfect. He was getting really good at dad jokes—this would surely improve his case against Pepper about kids. “And don’t go to bed too late. May wanted me to let you know that curfew rules still apply.”

“Okay,” Peter said.

“Let me know if you need anything.”

“Okay.”

“Night, kid.”

“Night, Tony.”

* * *

He still dreamed terrible dreams sometimes—dreams that were very cold and dark, or otherwise too loud and fast, and sometimes a combination of both—but he was steadier and more measured than he had been five years ago, and the time gone by ample enough for the dreams to decrease in frequency and intensity with him hardly noticing the change at first, gradual as it was.

Tonight he dreamed of his mother. He saw her standing in front of her dressing table in the master bedroom, a heavy, French, mahogany thing. Her hair was still dark. She was putting on her jewelry, an elaborate process that had impressed Tony as a young boy, because while Howard had worked intricately, often with volatile, birdlike apparatus, he had never worked patiently.

Maria’s fingers selected a pair of earrings, passing over a dozen others first, and inserted them. First left ear then right. She was speaking indistinctly, voice directed towards where Tony sat on the bed.

She undid the clasp on her most oft-worn necklace—thin gold chain, smooth ruby pendant—and her eyes met his in the dresser mirror; her lips moved.

 _You should come home more often,_ she seemed to be saying, but then Tony rose to the surface of consciousness and opened his eyes.

He felt inexplicably close to tears. The light filtering in through the curtains was thin and gray; he wanted to look at something grounding and real—the kid’s sleeping figure, maybe.

The face of his wife. But he’d settle for texting her.

 _We should buy a house in the suburbs,_ Tony typed. _Scrap the farmhouse a la Barton, I've never lived among the middle class masses and I think it'd be a good experience. The calm and quiet and slightly slower pace of life and clean air and backyards and kids and dogs etc etc you know I'm right._

 _Is this your weird thing about Princeton again,_ Pepper replied not a minute later.

 _Okay honey love you see you soon,_ he said, then set his phone facedown on the nightstand out of a vague sense of having been verbally attacked.

When the sun was fully up, he went and woke Peter.

* * *

They walked to the Audi at an unhurried pace, Tony watching Peter get one last good look at the ivy-covered buildings along the street. He could imagine the kid making a start to his life here, hefting his backpack to class among the tall oaks and the flowerbed daffodils just barely coming into bloom. Soon spring would come in full force. Time would hustle itself down the road, unrelenting; Peter would apply to a list of colleges and get accepted into some, hell, maybe all of them.

But for now Peter was only sixteen, and Tony hadn't invented a spectrometer that could sense the future just yet. He was all right with that.

"So how'd you like it here?" he asked.

"It was good," Peter replied, earnest as always. "Really beautiful, everyone was nice. I had a really weird dream last night."

"Good weird or bad weird?”

“I don’t know. Just weird. It was like, your dad was there and he told me that Iron Man wasn’t… real science? And he was like, ‘The Manhattan Project is way cooler,’ and then he dropped a bomb on the art museum.”

Tony laughed. “Sounds like him. That’s some kind of subliminal message there, kid.”

“Does it mean I should like Princeton or not?”

“I don’t know, you decide for yourself what Howard Stark’s opinion means to you.”

“I like it here,” Peter said seriously, “but I don’t know if it’s as cool as MIT. I liked the labs there a lot.”

"I wouldn't expect anything else," said Tony, waving his keys; the car let out a soft chirp.

"So are we... going home now?" Peter asked.

"Yeah, I'd better get you back to your aunt in one piece," said Tony, sliding into the driver's seat. And he was leaving now, of course, but perhaps he would return soon.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks, as always, to zachas for beta. This fic was certainly not me projecting my current college apps predicament onto Peter.  
>   
> [The Fountain of Freedom](https://c1.staticflickr.com/6/5333/7363829302_e23a0aba5d_b.jpg), also known as the Woody Woo fountain.  
> [The Peacock Inn](https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/10/06/fa/c9/the-peacock-inn.jpg), which is the place I had Tony and Peter stay at.  
> I had Tony and Peter get brunch at PJ's Pancake House, which has multiple locations in New Jersey but originated in Princeton.  
>   
> You can find me on Tumblr as [3wworms](http://3wworms.tumblr.com).


End file.
